The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: January 12, 1996
Section: Information Technology
Page: A18

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CYBERSPACE CITATIONS

Scholars Debate How Best to Cite Research Conducted on Line

By Lisa Guernsey

The nature of the Internet is wreaking havoc on what many scholars consider the mark of honest scholarship -- the citation.

Researchers, students, and librarians who use on-line texts face new questions when they attempt to write footnotes or bibliographic entries for the documents they use.

Standards for print materials, such as formats for publication dates, page numbers, and even punctuation, become confusing when applied to sources on the Internet, which may have no publication date or page numbers, and may require unconventional brackets for punctuation.

The usual authorities, which include professional associations such as the Modern Language Association and the American Psychological Association, are still debating specific standards for scholars in their disciplines. The Chicago Manual of Style, among other reference books, simply refers readers to an international standards organization, which is still struggling to reach agreement on new guidelines after five years of painstaking debate.

Meanwhile, individual researchers who have made their own rules are overwhelmed with requests for copies of their guidelines.

Among them is Melvin E. Page, a history professor at East Tennessee State University. He served as a moderator for an electronic-mailing list and was familiar with questions about how to cite materials such as electronic mail, Gopher sites, and World-Wide Web pages.

In October, Mr. Page created his own guidelines and posted them to "H-AFRICA," an electronic-mailing list related to his field. Within two days, the guidelines had been circulated on 30 other mailing lists devoted to the humanities.

Included in his guidelines is advice about punctuation, for example, which he sees as an important area of standardization. He recommends that people enclose Internet addresses -- especially those for the World-Wide Web -- in brackets, so that any accompanying punctuation, such as a period closing a footnote, is not thought to be part of the addresses.

Other common issues, according to librarians and researchers, include:

* How to create a permanent citation for an on-line document that is periodically moved or is changed in content.

* How to direct readers to a deeply embedded quotation when page numbers don't exist on the World-Wide Web.

* How to cope with citations of a mailing-list document that was never archived and no longer exists.

As the questions accumulate, the size of the task becomes clear, according to Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language Association, which publishes style guides for researchers and students of literature.

"Before now, we were relying on 600 years of the print record and its elaborate infrastructure to guide the citation of a printed work," she says. "A reader who wishes to locate a book can take a few pieces of information -- the author's name and title -- to a library or bookstore anywhere in the world and find out if it's available.

"You don't have that infrastructure yet in the electronic world." Finding a World-Wide Web page or an old mailing-list message would be very difficult if the searcher knew only the author and title, she adds.

The problem is made more critical, she says, when one considers the challenges posed by on-line resources that may move or disappear in a short time. This issue, researchers say, could have a major impact on the future of scholarship.

"What we've debated at length is, 'What happens when documents that people might quote might disappear, be altered, or not be readily available?'" she says. "Is this just part of the changing nature of texts? And what does this do to scholarship?"

The International Organization for Standardization, a federation of national-standards organizations from more than 100 countries, has been grappling with the same question for five years.

"Part of it is tied into how our electronic resources are going to count on the tenure track," says Jane M. Thacker, secretary of the group's committee that creates citation standards. People who publish on the Internet will receive credit only if others are able to cite and find their work, she says.

The M.L.A. "has concluded that scholarship depends on getting back to a source," Ms. Franklin says. It is talking about the "notion of archival copies, which would be important to scholars so that people could get back to their text." For now, however, researchers are simply trying to find some basic rules. Exactly what pieces of information, they ask, should be included in notes or a bibliography?

The M.L.A.'s latest style rules mention the inclusion of specific Internet addresses, for example, but do not require them. Ms. Franklin says association members worry that requiring such specific information might be asking too much of students unaccustomed to the Internet. The use of "Online" to indicate how the text was found is the M.L.A.'s only requirement.

For Janice R. Walker, however, style guidelines that fail to require Internet addresses are unacceptable. Ms. Walker, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of South Florida, says she was so desperate for useful guidelines that she created them herself -- based on M.L.A. style -- and posted them on the World-Wide Web.

The response, she says, "has been incredible. I have been inundated with requests from universities, libraries, public and private schools, students, and faculty" throughout the world. Many ask for permission to use her guidelines as handouts for classes and supplements to dissertations.

HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin are including her guidelines in upcoming editions of style books, and the Alliance for Computers & Writing, which tracks innovations in technology and their effect on the writing process, has endorsed her guidelines instead of the M.L.A.'s most-recent efforts.

Other researchers have also posted their own citation ideas on the Internet. Librarians at the Queen's University Libraries, in Kingston, Ontario, have produced a World-Wide Web site intended for use on their campus, with several examples of Internet citations. And several individuals have built Web pages with links to sources that provide partial answers.

Many of these on-line resources cite Electronic Style: A Guide to Citing Electronic Information (Meckler), a book written in 1993 by Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane. Based on the American Psychological Association's style for social-science research, it was the first published guide to citing electronic information.

In March, Meckler will publish Ms. Li's and Ms. Crane's The Official Internet World Guide to Electronic Styles: A Handbook to Citing Electronic Information, which will include A.P.A.- and M.L.A.-style citations.

But even with its publication, Ms. Crane, who is a reference librarian with Ms. Li at the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont, says the need for standards is stronger than ever. She is keeping an eye on Ms. Thacker's committee, which is reviewing a draft document that may provide a hint of the future.

The document suggests the inclusion of Internet addresses and dates indicating when a text was viewed. It labels as "required" certain elements of a citation, such as the name of the item as shown on the computer screen, or the means of access, whether on line, on a computer disk, or via CD-ROM.

Final international standards will not be ready for publication for at least a year, Ms. Thacker says.

The U.S. participant on the international committee, the National Information Standards Organization, made up of a group of American information associations, is also revising its standards. Patricia Harris, executive director, does not expect complete revisions until at least late this year.

Changing technology is not making standardization quick or easy, but in the end the increasing use of the Internet may be what "plays to the hand" of those wanting some answers, Ms. Harris says. "We cannot sit on this forever," she says. "People need this information."

Citation Guides on the Internet

"A Brief Citation Guide for Internet Sources in History and the Humanities," by Melvin E. Page.
gopher://h-net.msu.edu:70/00/lists/H-AFRICA/internet-cit

"Bibliographic Formats for Citing Electronic Information" includes examples of new guidelines that will be included in Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane's upcoming book, The Official Internet World Guide to Electronic Styles: A Handbook to Citing Electronic Information (Meckler, 1996).
http://www.uvm.edu/~xli/reference/estyles.html

"MLA-Style Citations of Electronic Sources," by Janice R. Walker.
http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/mla.html

Source: Chronicle reporting.

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Copyright (c) 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
http://chronicle.com
Title: Scholars Debate How Best to Cite Research Conducted on Line
Published: 96/01/12

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Last updated: Monday, 04-Aug-2003 13:18:42 CDT